Sword of Lug. 12 But the sole authority on which this grouping of talismans rests is the seventeenth century Irish historian, Keating. He usually draws from old sources but in this instance, no one can say how old or how late. Moreover, Keating does not define the nature of these talismans, or "treasures" merely, as he calls them. He expressly identifies the Stone of Destiny with the stone brought by Edward I from Scone in Scotland, which to-day rests in Westminster Abbey and is occupied by the English kings on the occasion of their coronation. Perhaps, the sword and spear of the same list were as little marvellous as the stone. All this is obviously too vague to form the basis for conclusions of any value. And it is to be remembered still further that this late list of objects which we know nothing about is Irish, and we have not a scrap of evidence to prove that it was known to the only Celtic peoples from whom a writer of Northern France would with any probability have drawn his materials, viz. the Welsh and the Bretons. Finally, in regard to these supposed evidences of the Celtic origin of the Grail, it has been argued 13 that the position of the fireplace in the hall of the Grail castle as described by Chrétien, of plenty, just as his previous article was intended to illustrate the derivation of the Grail spear from a marvellous Celtic spear. But to me these illustrations are as little convincing as the others. The passages quoted by Brown contain some instances of miraculous feeding and some examples of the syncretism of Christian and pagan elements, but there is really no distinctly marvellous vessel in them, and the accompanying incidents are about as different from those which we find in the Grail romances as one could imagine. Already in "Notes on Celtic Cauldrons of Plenty and the LandBeneath-The-Waves", Kittredge Anniversary Papers, pp. 235 ff. (Boston and London, 1913), Brown had tried to prove that these cauldrons were connected with the Celtic under-sea Elysium and that the Grail castle was also connected with the sea hence that the Grail was in origin such a Celtic cauldron, this feature, which the two have in common, confirming the evidence of other features of similarity. Nutt, op. cit., p. 184, had already made this identification. By W. A. Nitze, in an important article, "The Castle of the Grail an Irish Analogue," Studies in Honor of A. Marshall Elliott, I, 19ff. (issued in 1911 at Baltimore, though undated). 12 13 11. 3055 ff. betrays Celtic origin. It is said that the fire before which the Grail-King sat was between four columns and that four hundred men could conveniently sit about this fire. The columns that held up the chimney were strong and made of brass. Now, the chimneys of French mediaeval castles were the same as at present, whereas the fire here is in the open hearth in the centre of the hall, like the one in the palace at Tara, as described in the Irish sagas. We are dealing, however, with a romance with a narrative of a fantastic kind like that of a folk-tale, and it is questionable whether we should expect in such a work literal conformity with the actual customs of the time, even granting that no such primitive hearth may have really existed by way of survival in some French castles of the twelfth century. Moving in the atmosphere of a folktale, the poet may have purposely made his description archaic. In any event, there is no sufficient certainty about the matter for this detail to turn definitely the scales in favor of the Celtic theory. In conclusion, it is obvious from this discussion, that the theory that in Celtic folk-tales the Grail legend found its origin is not satisfactory. No one has as yet brought forward a folk-tale, Celtic or otherwise, corresponding in incident and setting to the Grail story. Parallels (not very satisfactory in themselves) to the individual features of it have to be collected from widely separated sources — sources, too, of uncertain date. This being the case, there is no need of considering a still further objection: 15 namely, the improbability that a purely folk-lore, food-providing vessel should be identified with the most sacred objects of the Christian faith, the Blood of the Redeemer, the Chalice of the Eucharist and that not in stories of popular origin, but in the long romances of educated men. As will have been seen above, the food-producing quality of the Grail does not appear in the earliest versions of the legend - Chrétien's and Robert's. It is a later development, being found first in Pseudo-Wauchier (11. 20114ff.), and the very fact that a poet did attach to the vessel 14 15 So Miss J. L. Weston, Quest of the Holy Grail, p. 70. this quality, although his predecessors had described it as holy, tends to prove that the mediaeval romancers did not have the scruples that some scholars have imputed to them. But the reasons already advanced for rejecting the Celtic theory are, we believe, sufficient.16 16 Celtic traces in certain names which we find in the Grail romances have no force in sustaining the theory of Celtic origins. For example, in Romania, XXIV, 322, F. Lot calls attention to the place name, "Chateau de Lis" in the first continuation to Chrétien's Perceval. Lis, as he points out, is llys, the Welsh word for "castle." But the writer is here probably adopting Lis as a place-name from Chrétien's Perceval, where we have a character named "Meliant de Liz (or Lis)." We have considered Chrétien's relation to supposed Celtic sources above. There is no doubt that in any event he would try to give a Celtic coloring to whatever romance he might write. Chapter III. The Ritual Theory. The third theory of the origin of the Grail legend is one which was suggested by Simrock as far back as 1842 in the notes to his translation of Wolfram von Eschenbach1 namely, that the conception of the Grail sprang from the ritual of some cult of the Vegetation Spirit, or "the slain God", as he is called very often in the history of religion, as typified, for example, in Adonis and Osiris. This particular theory, however, has only assumed importance in the last ten years or so through the publication of W. A. Nitze's "The Fisher King in the Grail Romances",3 and 1 For a convenient summary of Simrock's views, cp. Nutt's Studies on the Legend of the Holy Grail, pp. 100f. 2 It lies, also, at the bottom of E. Martin's identification of the sick Grail King with the wounded Arthur, Zur Gralsage, pp. 31ff. (Strassburg, 1880), and in his edition of Wolfram, pp. LVIII ff.; for he interprets (p. 32) the wounded Arthur, who is borne to Avalon, but is destined to return healed, as a representative of the Vegetation God. The best refutation, I may add, of Martin's identification is the fact that we find Arthur in all the romances in which the Grail King appears, except Robert's Joseph, and yet the two are never identified. In the Joseph, the action of which, besides, does not lie in Britain, sickness or lameness is not an attribute of the Grail King. We have, of course, stories (some of which are cited by Martin) in which Arthur is pictured as living in fairy-land style (especially in mountains) and as subsisting, presumably, in a miraculous manner, and in these respects there are points of contact between his legend and that of the Grail King, but these are, obviously, merely general folklore motifs. For a criticism of Martin's theory, cp. Heinzel, pp. 67f. Cp. with Martin's theory the story about the imprisonment of Cronos on an isle near Britain, which Rhys, pp. 367f, quotes from Plutarch. 8 It was published in PMLA., XXIV, 365 ff. (1909). Miss J. L. Weston's Legend of Sir Perceval, Vol. 2 (1909).* Although these two scholars worked out the theory independently of each other, their results agree in the most essential respects. It was obviously under the influence of Frazer's Golden Bough that both were led to adopt this theory. First, as regards Professor Nitze, he takes for comparison the Eleusinian mysteries of Greece which was a Demeter cult- that is, a cult of the Vegetation Spirit. The Grail procession is, then, by origin, a vegetation ceremony, and "The Holy Grail, by the mediaeval romancers often conceived in terms of a quest, is au fond an initiation, the purpose of which is to ensure the life of the vegetation spirit, always in danger of extinction and to admit the 'qualified' mortal into its mystery" (p. 394). Professor Nitze thinks that, like the Eleusinian, the Grail rites may have been Already in Vol. I (1906) of this work (pp. 329 ff.) Miss Weston had put forward her theory. She developed it more fully in a paper, "The Grail and the Rites of Adonis," which she read before the FolkLore Society on December 19, 1906, and which was published in Folk-Lore, XVIII, 283 ff. (Sept. 1907). Vol. II of her Legend of Sir Perceval, however, contains the completest exposition of her theory, although the essentials are more clearly presented in her Folk-Lore paper, just mentioned, and in a more recent book, The Quest of the Holy Grail, pp. 75 ff. (London, 1913). In her latest Grail treatise, From Ritual to Romance, (Cambridge, 1920), she tries, still further, to bring together parallels to each feature of the Grail story from the records of the pagan mystery cults and to show the intimate union that once existed between the latter and Christianity. It is characteristic of her method of work, when she declares (p. 5 of the lastnamed treatise) that her aim is "to determine the origin, not to discuss the provenance and interrelation of the different versions." I do not believe this latter task can be satisfactorily achieved unless and until we are of one accord as to the character of the subject matter. When we have made up our minds as to what the Grail really was, and what it stood for, we shall be able to analyze the romances; to decide which of them contains more, which less of the original matter, and to group them accordingly." But to approach the texts with preconceived notions, instead of making them, in due historical order, as far as that can be ascertained, the primary basis of the whole investigation is, obviously, the reverse of all sound scientific method. |